Image source: S. Bielanko
Back story:
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article called My Toddler Was Rude to a Little Girl (and I Loved It). In it, I told the true tale of something that happened to me recently at the local library. My three-year-old son, Henry, was kind of rude to a little girl. It was a pretty typical incident, to be honest. Kids are kids and sometimes they aren’t all that worried about other kids’ feelings or whatever.
If your kid is never like that, I guess that’s pretty great. But I also guess it’s a damn lie, too.
Anyway, the little girl survived her run-in with my son just fine. I didn’t harp on it too much because that wasn’t even the point of my story.
My reason for writing about that afternoon was actually something way bigger and better, I thought. I wanted to drive home the epiphany I had that day: how my toddler son was so desperate and hungry for some one-on-one time with his daddy that he wasn’t willing to share even a moment of that time with another child.
A few days after my story was published here on Babble, I happen to be looking at the website’s Facebook feed and came across the link to my piece. I noticed there were a pretty good amount of comments underneath it, too.
“Cool,” I thought. “Let me see what people are saying.”
In a lot of ways, though, man, I wish I’d never even looked.
—
I don’t write stuff to get people to call me names. Or at least I thought I didn’t. But as it turns out, a lot of moms and dads out there in the world are signing on to the internet with a huge chip on their shoulder these days. Born of loneliness or inner rage or just plain boredom, it’s hard to say where human beings with children in this modern world find themselves deciding to call an unknown dad bar fight names. But it happens. A lot.
And even though it won’t ever make a bit of difference, it’s just good to call people like that out every now and then, I think.
So here I am. Maybe I’m taking a tip from Lindy West’s recent segment on This American Life where she confronts her worst internet troll head on and gets an apology.
Or maybe I’m talking to the wind.
Or talking to some wicked gales who never pipe down long enough to even hear the sound of someone else’s heart beating.
—
“That poor little girl! Like father like son, both LOSERS!”
At the time, there were maybe 75 comments, nearly every one of them from women. And with the exception of maybe four or five of them, they were resoundingly cruel and astonishingly barbaric.
I’m paraphrasing here, but they mostly went something like this:
“That dad is an a**hole. His son is out of control”
“If that were me, that dad would have had a real problem on his hands.”
“This is what’s wrong with kids today. There’s a bunch of stupid parents and no discipline.”
“That little boy is going to grow up to be a jacka** just like his father. No wonder that guy is divorced! Who would want to be married to such a jerk!”
You get the idea.
I didn’t do much researching them, but with a few cursory profile peeks, it did appear that most of them were themselves moms, with picture of them and their kids plastered all over their Facebook walls.
That’s when it hit me.
Who is the real a**hole here?
Whose kid is more likely to be affected by a parent with more than a couple screws loose — mine or the kid who is growing up in a home where his or her mom can’t hold back from unleashing hair-trigger reactionary nonsense to a writer they have never met, and whose story they simply didn’t have the actual time or depth of intellect to even grasp?
And yeah, I know you could say that maybe I missed my mark. Maybe my article, what with its click-baiting title and all, was asking to be misinterpreted and attacked right from the onset. I hear that. I can see your point.
But you’re wrong if you think that.
Seriously.
—
All my stuff, all the stuff I write: it isn’t genius or anything, I know that.
But whatever.
It’s still always my very best attempt at trying to capture the essence of parenthood, I can tell you that much.
I think about my three kids and for whatever reason, I often picture them reading a few of the things I wrote about each of them aloud to each other someday, as they share a few beers and a basket of fries at some bar somewhere a few hours after my funeral.
In total honesty, I conjure up that scenario a lot. Who knows why? I had my kids later in life and I’m not going to be around forever. It is what it is.
—
Parenting changed a lot of things for me. Not everything, of course. You never stop learning. My life after 43 years, ugh, it makes me cry sometimes, a lot of times, when I think about the mistakes I made or how I might have done certain things differently.
And in a bunch of ways, I think it’s cool to be someone who finally recognizes that behind every kid who is bad or every adult who is weird or mean or blue, there is a lot more than meets the naked eye.
But most of the people who left their mean comment on my article only concentrated on the one rude sentence my three-year-old had said to another kid, a comment he spurted out in a moment when he really wanted to have some rare one-on-one time with his daddy.
None of the comments said, “Hey dad, good luck.” No one said, “Man, at least dude’s trying.” It appeared, in fact, that no one amongst the multitude of opinionated commenters really bothered to actually read and ponder my story at all. They simply read the words of a little boy and were off to the nasty races.
And that’s so sad when you think about it.
I mean, if you’re someone who actually thinks about stuff.
—
“Dad was kinda nuts,” Violet will say with a smile.
“Yeah, he sure was,” Charlie will chime in. “But man, all that stuff he wrote about us, all those things he wrote about just watching us grow up as people and doing our thing, no matter what it was? How lucky are we to have that stuff, right? I don’t know anybody that has that type of a gift from their parent.”
Henry will stare at the bottles on the shelf behind the bar, maybe a tear in his eye, maybe a twinkle, hard to tell with Henry.
Then he’ll just sigh and look at his brother and sister, pop a fry in his mouth, take a sip of beer.
“You know what, yous guys? I think Dad knew what he was doing all along. I think he knew what he was doing by never ever knowing hardly anything he was doing, do you know what I mean?”
They’ll all grin. At least I hope they do. I really hope they do. Then Henry will wrap it up.
“Dad was a hot mess, but no matter what, he never stopped trying. That’s all anyone can do. That’s all any kid can ever hope for from his mom or dad, am I right? At least that’s what I think.”
And with that my soul will come flashing out of the walls, my ghost tap-dancing down that bar. Oh what a sight I’ll be then, the tips of my toes tinkling the rims of every damn pint glass up there, happy to have written all those words I wrote, as they finally … finally …. wind their way back home.
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